The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 was a crime against the state and the people, Serbian President Boris Tadic said on Saturday after a wreath-laying ceremony in Aleksinac, central Serbia, as part of commemorations marking the 13th anniversary of the start of the air strikes which NATO launched against the regime of the then Yugoslav and Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in order to pre-empt genocide against Kosovo Albanians.
"Our country was too much bogged in wars in the 20th century, and we should do all to make sure that in the future our country will not be involved in any war, preserving, first of all, the human lives and our country," Tadic said after he placed a wreath at the monument erected in Aleksinac in memory of victims of the alliance's bombing campaign which lasted from March 24, 1999 to June 10, 1999.
"That war was a crime against our country and our people, and I have nothing to add," Tadic said.
The Serbian president said that "those who were killed could not be brought back to the life, but remembering them we can prolong their presence among us", adding that apart from Aleksinac, there were many places in Serbia where civilians were killed by NATO bombs.
Aleksinac came under NATO air attacks on 5 April 1999, when six rockets hit that town with 17,000 residents. In the first strike 11 people lost lives and in subsequent attacks the death toll rose by 13. Bombs struck a residential neighbourhood instead a military barracks by technical error, as it was later explained from Brussels,
Operation Allied Force predominantly used a large-scale air campaign to destroy Yugoslav military infrastructure from high altitudes. The Human Rights Watch reported that some 500 civilians lost their lives during the bombing campaign, while the local news agency Tanjug claimed that the NATO operation took the lives of 2,500 civilians, including 89 children.
